Is it vocab related or not?

I had a quick question for some of you who are beginners , intermediate or knocking on the door of fluency. How did you improve your listening comprehension? And is listening comprehension the right way of putting it or am I mistaking that for just not knowing enough vovab?

At this point in my journey I'm not sure how much of my problem for understanding spoken Mandarin is listening related, or just not knowing enough vocabulary. Then sometimes a word I know very well will sometimes slip right by me

Take for example any Jiangsu TV show like "You are the one" or "TK11". At times i'll understand a good portion of it, then at times it will completely go over my head. Again though sometimes I miss words on those shows that I know! It's kind of frustrating and I sometimes wonder if I'm just having trouble breaking down what they're saying. Overall i'd say I can understand (premise) maybe 40-45% of the TK11 show and maybe less than 30% of the You are the one show. I assume the TK11 is easier for me just because they're foreign and speaking slightly slower

I've been learning Mandarin since January of 2016 so not really that long. Anyway, just curious of the experience of others here and did you find it was just having to get used to hearing the language? Or was it just because you didn't know enough vocab?

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Though I'm native speaker, I may have suggestions, for I learned English as second language.

For listening comprehension, problems can be caused partly by lack of vocabulary, but what matters more is one have to read more, imitate and speak more for better listening performance. One don't have to recite a lot of words and he can enlarge the vocabulary by looking for informations or passages of a theme or a topic.

And from my own experience, more speaking helps the listening in the long-term.Get used to hearing the language and also, one has to repeat and learn to speak out loud, then he will know the difference between correct pronounciation and what he just spoke out. By knowing that, he'd better adjust himself. The more he does so, the less listening problems he will meet.